The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Hey, if it's called a hierarchy doesn't that imply that the slave races are ranked against each other in worth? Does that mean Admiral ZEX could boss around all of the presumably lower ranking Umgah and Spathi?

I got the impression that it was a relatively flat hierarchy. With
the Ur-Quan at the top and...well, everyone else at the bottom.
Maybe the combat thralls would rank above fallow slaves, because the
fallows would be required to repair/fuel thralls.

I don't think the Starbases the fallow slaves are forced to keep running are much more than intergalactic rest stops.

I think it's a "Hierarchy" in the sense that the Ur-Quan don't create their own command structure that oversees all their slaves. Their slaves are allowed to maintain their governments and military chains of command: the Spathi Safe Ones, the Ilwrath priesthood, the VUX High Council, the Thraddash Culture Nineteen. The Ur-Quan just overlay their own command structure on top, giving orders to the race's leaders and letting the leaders go about getting the rest of the race to obey. Thus there's many levels of command taking care of the work, and the Ur-Quan can maintain the empire with relatively few Ur-Quan Lords overseeing everything.

I doubt the slaves are ranked against each other, or allowed to give orders to each other, or really forced to interact with each other that much at all. It certainly wouldn't be a good way to reduce tension within the ranks or avoid breeding resentment. The Ur-Quan probably rank races in order of usefulness, and deploy them accordingly (look at the Thraddash), but we never hear any hint of VUX officials giving orders to Spathi, and in fact the races are usually referred to as fighting more or less separately, with some exceptions like the Earthguard (and you'll notice that in Earthguard the more militarily important Ilwrath race nonetheless didn't seem to have the formal power to command Spathi soldiers, who are described as conferring with each other and giving orders to each other and receiving them from Spathiwa).

I would imagine that the races have equal rank, but their usefulness in battle would make them scalable automatically.

Sort of like Patton commanding another, less decorated general who is equal rank...the latter would listen closely, if he had any sense.

The Ur-Quan portion of the Heirarchy seems to be a pretty vertical organization, with Lord 1 at the top, and lord x (where x is the Ur-Quan population) at the bottom.  Below Lord x would be the various battle thralls, under their own governance, but compelled to give logistic and military support to the Ur-Quan, and below the thralls would be the fallow slaves, who are to be mainly administrated in their own imprisonments.

The drawback to the battle thrall system was pretty plain: as long as the Ur-Quan armada maintained the threat of an invincible beatstick, the thralls were manageable, but without the immediate threat of annihilation, the system broke down pretty quickly.  Specifically:

Umgah: While they remained loyal to the Ur-Quan in the big-picture sense, they did seem bound and determined to break all the "little" rules in pursuit of practical jokes, causing worse problems than active disloyalty.  Clonking a Mycon the Ur-Quan might overlook, but engineering a talking pet back to sentience, and their pranks with the Ilwrath could very well have gotten them annihilated.

Ilwrath: "Dogar and Kazon commanded us" probably wasn't going to impress the Ur-Quan much as an excuse for: deserting their post at the moon base, practicing genocide against the Pkunk, or starting a war of mutual annhilation against another battle thrall.

Thraddash: Had a pretty short attention span, and were perfectly willing to jump the fence and ally with the latest species to impress them militarily.

Vux: Okay, they mostly behaved, although admiral Zex's manipulating the human captain for his own purposes before trying to kill him would have been frowned upon.

Androsynth: Hard to say anything about their loyalty without more data, but one would have to think the Ur-Quan would have some sort of laws about forbidden military research, if for no other reason than to insure they don't get overthrown.

Yehat: The kettle was going to boil over on this one sooner or later... it was just a question of how long the starship clans were going to overlook the queen's dishonoring her entire species to preserve her undefeated streak on a technicality.

Mycon: I'm pretty sure that their taking advantage of the Ur-Quans' abscence to expand their influence violated some slave laws.  The Mycon are pretty tough to get a handle on anyway, having the most alien thought processes of any species short of the Orz.  However, I believe the quote:

"Juffo-Wup acknowledges the existence of un-Voidable Non when we are faced with such, we join, absorb and wait for our opportunity to learn the weakness that will allow us to Void the Non."

pretty much indicates the Mycon are ultimately the most disloyal race in the Heirarchy.

Spathi: Are basically going to obey the last person to convincingly threaten them, so are naturally unreliable.  Deserting the moonbase and later joining the alliance (if only to get the perk of illegally changing their slave status) aren't going to sit well with the Greenies.


So, in conclusion, I'd have to say that the Path of Now and Forever, and the Heirarchy in particular, were inevitible failures.  The eternal doctrine, with all its own problems, was a much more realistic goal.

Actually, we're specifically told *not* to assume that the Ur-Quan have a purely vertical organization with Lord 1 at the top; the SC1 manual tells us that while the human researches *think* it's something like this, because lower-numbered Lords seem to have more authority, they can't be sure, and they think there is some more complex pattern that explains the numbers' significance, since the numbers we see seem to come out of odd places in the list (a lot of two-digit numbers and only a few three-digit numbers, for instance).



The Doctrinal Conflict was, after all, a special case that required all available Kzer-Za forces to be called into action immediately. Most of the time there'd probably be some sort of system put in place to watch over the Battle Thralls they left behind. Part of me wonders if Battle Thralls aren't just used to fight local wars and if the Kzer-Za's best strategy might not be to slave-shield all Thrall species after the local conflict is over.



I don't really think so; we have the obvious evidence that the Path of Now and Forever worked all the way up until the next Doctrinal Conflict, after all. Again, we have to think of the Doctrinal Conflict as a special case where *all* other forms of administration had to be dropped to fight the Kohr-Ah. During normal situations, the Kzer-Za seemed pretty adept at forcing races into submission, especially given that they have the ultimate threat of the Sa-Matra. And the existence of Battle Thralls probably gives them a lot of flexibility that the Kohr-Ah don't have.

Just had to comment on this. I hate to tell you, but what most people said (at least according to what their logs said), they "were more afraid of him than they ever were of the germans."

I would be too, but he WAS a brilliant tactitian.

Indeed. It would also be quite senseless to assume that every Quan out there was enough of a tactician to be allowed to control the entire Battle Thralll fleets. It seems quite likely to me that some Kzer-Za would be more tactically gifted, while otehrs would be more of the fighting sort. We know the Kohr-Ah have a Primat, but even there we have no clue as to how much power she weilds within their ranks. The same is probably true of the Kzer-Za.



This has been mentioned in earlier discussions, and I must say I concur completely. Behind the Kzer-Za, there are probably only a lot of ruby red shields. I'd also find it pobable that there are small groups of Kzer-Za left behind. Why? because the Kzer-Za do not commit genocide. Therefore, they must leave some forces behind to make sure no stars go nova and wipe out any shielded race.

Unless the entire process was automated...the big question that I have is if the 'Quan leave all their thralls behind, how come they didn't start the war (SC1) with only 1 crew?

I actually wonder if the Kzer-Za have any internal hierarchy at all. They seem to have a territorial instinct a whole lot more powerful than the Kohr-Ah's, given their one Ur-Quan per ship policy; how well would they take to taking orders from one another?

The main interesting thing to me is that we never hear about any Kzer-Za governing structure or see any Kzer-Za go off to consult with his superiors. The speech in which the Kohr-Ah Primat is mentioned, interestingly, contains no mention of an equivalent Kzer-Za Primat; even for an issue as grave as the return of the Dnyarri, the Kzer-Za Lord makes the decision *by himself* not to contact the Primat, and *by himself* decides to postpone action on the Dnyarri until after the Doctrinal Conflict. If Kzer-Za had any obligations to superiors at all, surely it would be to inform superiors about something like that.

My theory is that the Kohr-Ah, designed to be laborers and soldiers, take to organized, cooperative work with each other a lot better. Kzer-Za were the smart ones, and so the Dnyarri probably would want to discourage collusion among them as much as possible; my theory is that Kzer-Za numberings indicate seniority or respect, the degree to which a Kzer-Za is considered experienced or wise, but no Kzer-Za seems to actually have the authority to give orders to any other; they're all individual Lords aboard their individual Dreadnought-kingdoms, united by a common philosophy. That goes along with their conviction that Ur-Quan are by nature masters and must be constantly superior to all others, who are slaves (the attitude that the Kohr-Ah have such contempt for).

The Ur-Quan might shield the thralls' homeworlds, but of course they'd make exceptions for their special, favored slaves on board the ships, just as they make exceptions for the slaves picked to work on the starbases.

Well, obviously - the lower the number, the higher the "rank" in the 'quan ladder of hierarchy. I guess that death 1 or lord 1 is surpreme leader.

As for gender, here is a radical idea, do the Ur-quan have them? I have not really looked, so this might be squashed with one reply, but are the UIr-quan asexual?  

I just posted as to why, while we know there's a Kohr-Ah Primat who's probably a leader (and probably numbered Death 1), it's a strong possibility that while Lord 1 may be the most respected Kzer-Za there is no Kzer-Za Primat or supreme leader; the Kzer-Za don't seem to be the type for taking orders from each other, in my estimation.

We know that the Ur-Quan reproduce sexually -- the Melnorme directly tell us that before civilization the Ur-Quan's only social interaction rituals were the ones that dealt with sex. Also, the Kohr-Ah make reference to brothers and sisters as separate entities, implying that they do have sexes and recognize genders; similarly the Kzer-Za Lord refers to the Kohr-Ah Primat as "she", while the original namesakes Kzer-Za and Kohr-Ah are both, I think, referred to as "he".

As far as whether they have gender, I don't think they do -- I doubt a species as individualistic as the Ur-Quan would develop social interactions to the point of having gender roles the way humans do. The use of the gendered pronouns is a convention that the Talking Pets probably automatically use to fall in line with human speech; I'd be surprised if the Ur-Quan themselves particularly cared whether any one of them was male or female.

Unless, like in many spiders, the female was MUCH bigger.

Why are we discussing the mating habits of gigantic insectoid psycopaths? =p

Someone had an interesting theory up a while ago about how the "real" Ur-Quan that we see are all females, and the Ur-Quan hives are controlled by single, intelligent females with a bunch of male mates that act as mindless slaves.

It was pretty well done, though there was almost no evidence actually supporting it in the game.

Though the Ur-Quan never mention a leader or primate, that
doesn't mean there isn't one...or maybe a consul of some sort. I think
it's likely they wouldn't tell the rebel human about their command structure.

No, telling the rebel their command structure would be bad.

Reminds me of what happened in a SW sim I'm in.  A Sith previously killed a government's King and his queen/XO.  A few days later he asks who their third in command is and some of the idiots started to tell him.  They deserved to be gutted. :P

But then why would he talk to himself about his *own* opinion of whether or not to warn the Kohr-Ah Primat? Surely if he had a commanding officer, he'd be relieved to leave that decision to his leaders...

Maybe they are intelligent to communicate on 2 channels at once...simultaneously discussing with the primat while threatening to agnigilate you?

Somehow I doubt even with really great technology the Kzer-Za could hold a conference about this issue over such long distances in the time it takes to pause in a conversation with you.

By the way, what's with the consistent misspelling of "annihilate"? Is it a reference to the Kohr-Ah joke in the credits?

Well, the Druuge DO know that you "stole" the bomb from them as fast as the your ship can get to them via Quasi-space, so it would not be that bad. The Ur-quan would probably have better tech too.

Of course...






The real reason *sob* is that I cannot, actually, spell angigilate =/

I think that in the UQM universe, some forms of communication are near instant. Which sort of makes sense, the Starbase Commander tells you
about the Pkunk moving as soon as they begin their journey.
The Syreens know of their victory over the Mycon before the fungus
even make it home again.

Also, with the Ur-Quan, I think some of us are forgetting that they're
telepathic (to some degree). It's possible that they can communicate
instantly and silently to other Ur-Quan anywhere.

Um, where the heck does it say Ur-Quan are telepathic? They communicate telepathically with the Talking Pets, but that's because the Talking Pets are (extremely) telepathic and can be trained (or genetically engineered) to pick up their thoughts while they speak. It certainly seems like the neo-Dnyarri has no trouble reading anyone's mind, regardless of how telepathic its target is.

I think it's actually pretty unlikely that they'd be telepathic; why would a species so radically individualistic and asocial evolve something like telepathy? And it seems to me that the way SC2 classifies "psi abilities" as a sort of general level of talent, a more telepathic species would be *less* vulnerable to attack from a telepathic mind-controller like the Dnyarri, not *especially* vulnerable to it.

Well, certainly long-range Hyperwave exists -- it's the means by which you contact the Melnorme, after all. It just doesn't seem common, given how expensive the Umgah and Burvix casters are.
Anyway, there are very simple explanations for both of these. The Syreen probably got their information from the Syreen captains who came *back* after the Mycon defeat -- a sphere of influence obviously doesn't contain every single ship belonging to that species within it, and it also seems obvious that a quick assault fleet of Syreen could move faster than a big Mycon fleet shepherding Deep Children (besides which Penetrators are faster than Podships).

And the game *gives* you an explanation for how Hayes detects the Pkunk's journey. There's a huge series of disturbances in Hyperspace, all in phase, as though a fleet of ships were moving, remember?

All this means is that waves moving through Hyperspace can be detected from pretty far away, which makes sense, and that what limits the range of Hyperwaves is random events that break up the signal and make it less coherent, which also makes sense. You can detect the Pkunk *moving* from far away, because of the big burst of energy that comes from their motion, but you can't send messages back and forth from that distance because the signal gets too garbled. Remember how Hayes specifically tells you that they can clearly pick up some sort of signal from Rigel, but because of the distance it's impossible to clearly read what it says from Sol?

Since you obviously weren't paying attention while playing the game, let me give you some examples of psi and telepathy from the Ur-Quan.

1. There is something wrong here... something which makes my sheath retract and my talons ooze.
I sense the ugliness of a thousand evil thoughts
and I have located the source of these fetid emanations.
They come from aboard your vessel!
Foolish renegade human, why have you come here? All that you have found
is your inevitable punishment.

2. We sense... something... something ancient... a sickly smell... a chilling wind. My ancestors scream from within their chambers in my mind
but I cannot understand their words.

3. We, the Ur-Quan who could not tolerate the presence of others...

4. Of all the species we have met, only the Taalo did not trigger our instinctive territoriality. They were the only people we could stand with, or talk to, without the hunter inside us screaming `Kill the interloper! Rip out its life!'
We believe that the same factors that made the Taalo non-threatening to us
their unusual rock-like biology also gave the Taalo natural immunity to the Dnyarri's psychic compulsion.



Also, here are an examples of the Ur-Quan talking about a leader, or primate:
1. "Perhaps we should contact the Kohr-Ah Primat, explain to her."

2. "We had slave-shielded one world, when we learned that the Black Ur-Quan under a new leader, Kohr-Ah, had devised the Eternal Doctrine
which called for the `cleansing', the annihilation, of all non-Ur-Quan sentient life."

...And you seem to have at least partly not been paying attention to my posts. So...



These are the only two compelling arguments you have. However, all they indicate is that the Ur-Quan can tell when a Dnyarri is around, not that they themselves have telepathic powers. Recall that the Dnyarri, even when under the Taalo Shield, is still capable of actively reading the minds of others.

Though I'm going back slightly on my tentative hypothesis that a less-psionically-aware being is easier to control than a more-psionically-aware one, I advance that It's certainly possible that a species can be aware that its mind is being probed ("passive sensing") without being able to send telepathic messages itself ("active sensing"). Indeed, since the current two Ur-Quan subspecies were *designed* to be under constant telepathic surveillance and control, it may be that their brains are hypersensitive to being telepathically messed with. In no way does this indicate that they themselves can telepathically send messages, or are telepathic at all when the Dnyarri aren't involved.



...Yeah, so? These don't say anything about telepathy. ("Territoriality" doesn't mean "telepathy", if that's what was confusing you.) It's pretty clear that the Ur-Quan just didn't like being around other life forms -- it says absolutely nothing about their having some ability to telepathically sense other life forms are around. Plenty of people in real life can't stand other people -- that means they can't stand to *look at* other people, *hear* other people talk, and in other ways detect other people with perfectly ordinary biological senses.

Yes, they say there's a link between the Taalo's biology and both their psionic immunity and their bypassing Ur-Quan territorial instincts. But I think the Ur-Quan are just saying that the Taalo, being made of rock, were radically different from other life forms in all ways, so it's not surprising that they not only look so different that the Ur-Quan don't feel instinctively threatened by them but that their brains somehow don't work in a way that the Dnyarri can exploit.




*sigh* YES, dude, I *know* about the Kohr-Ah Primat. That's what this whole damn discussion was about. Is there any reason to assume that the Kzer-Za and Kohr-Ah societies are identical? Any reason at all, really, given that we see many, many ways in which they are radically different?

The whole point of my original argument was that the Kzer-Za captain talks about negotiating *himself* with the Primat, rather than contacting a corresponding Kzer-Za Primat to conference about it first, indicating that Kzer-Za individuals seem to have a heck of a lot of discretionary power. Add to that the fact that no Kzer-Za Primat is ever mentioned, that the Kzer-Za in general seem to make snap decisions pretty easily, and that the Kzer-Za in general seem a lot more wary and territorial against each other than the Kohr-Ah (one Kzer-Za per Dreadnought compared to Marauders full of cooperating Kohr-Ah) and you have a weak but tractable argument that the Kzer-Za don't have a hierarchical society.

Also, did you notice that the Kohr-Ah are named after their original actual leader, while the Kzer-Za are never mentioned as having a leader? The original Kzer-Za whom they named themselves after died at the very beginning of the Slave Revolt; by the time of the victory and the parting of the two Paths of Now and Forever, he would have been a historical figure, a symbol. I find it interesting that the Kzer-Za chose a storybook character to name themselves after rather than a living leader, and I think it also speaks to the difference between the two subspecies.

Two remarks:

We do not know for sure that the Kohr-Ah primat is some sort of leader. It could just be the Kohr-Ah embassador to the Kzer-Za. Note that while they say "explain to her", but then "they will not understand". This could be construed as that the Primat doesn't have the power on her own to agree to a cease-fire. (Then again it could be understood as "The Primat, like all other Kohr-Ah, will not understand").

The Yehat on one occasion also refer to a Primat:
"After the War, we learned that the Primat and the VUX High Council decided to move ZEX out of the picture,". It's clear that they're not talking about a Kohr-Ah. It could be a Kzer-Za, or it could be a VUX. But as they already mentioned the VUX High Council, that would make the Primat a seperate power within the VUX government. And the VUX High Council does seem to be the body within the VUX government that makes the decisions, if you go by the other references to it.
So I expect that this Primat is indeed a Kzer-Za. And also, this Primat apparantly can make decisions of her/his own, which would go against the embassador theory.

Indeed. Good catch -- it seems that there is a Kzer-Za Primat, though I still maintain it's odd that we don't hear more from him or her and that the Kzer-Za Lords seem able to make so many of their own decisions.

Though "Primat" isn't defined for us, if we assume that it's an English translation and an alternate spelling of "primate" and not some random Ur-Quan word that sounds like "primat", then it does have the connotation of a leader or at least the most respected of a group -- "primate" literally means "first", or by extension "highest", "most noble", "most important". (Hence why it's the name we give to animals that are most like humans.) In the churches it means an archbishop who not only controls his own province but also has ranking power over a whole bunch of other archbishops with their own provinces. It may therefore be used as an appropriate parallel term for how the Kzer-Za and Kohr-Ah might work -- the archbishops of England are all technically equal in rank, as archbishops, but nonetheless the Archbishop of Canterbury is the "Primate of All England" in that he's more respected than all the other archbishops and has the implicit authority to lead them. It could be that Ur-Quan are all fundamentally equal in rank and have to respect each other as such, but nonetheless they pick one to make the most important decisions.

I'd always taken it to be short form of some bad Latin, namely "prima mater", or "first mother", if you will; I made this association on the basis that the Kohr-Ah Primat is designated as female.  But I suppose a bastardization of "primatus" would be more apporpriate to how the Ur-Quan are supposed to think, and isn't (necessarily) lmiited to a specific gender.

Can't priests only be Men...? =p

How do we know that the Ur-Quan have only 2 genders, and that those genders corrospond to our own?

The real-world "primate" is an English bastardization of the Latin "primas" or "first one" (it's a back-formation, from the fact that the plural of "primas" in Latin is "primates"). It's, IIRC, not associated with any particular gender, though in the context of the real-world Christian priesthood obviously all primates are men. "Primat" from "prima mater" is possible but, in my opinion, a rather more convoluted explanation than just an alternate form of "primate". (Interestingly "primat" is how you would spell "primate" in German, if that means anything to anyone.) I don't think we should read a whole lot into the fact that the Kohr-Ah Primat is a "she"; that betrays our *own* gender presuppositions (that leaders are naturally male, and when a leader is female it must be because of some special rule). I don't see why having a female Primat tells us any more about the Kohr-Ah than their having a male Primat would.

And yes, again I say I doubt the Ur-Quan are as hung up about gender as we are; if they evolved to each live as individuals, only coming together to hunt, instead of having a mother/father family structure like humans do, they'd have a lot less reason to have differences between males and females. They probably do have something like male and female sexes, though, given that they do choose to use the words "he" and "she" for different Ur-Quan rather than using a single generic pronoun for all Ur-Quan.

I meant "mate" in that last paragraph, not "hunt". (Given Ur-Quan habits they probably avoided each other as much as possible while hunting.)

I completely glossed over that, I just read it as Mate =p

How DO two incredibly huge, fearful, territorial caterpillars mate....On second thought, I don't really want to know =p

Imagine, if you will, a lonely, hyper catipiller, humping a large,
green french fry.

I would imagine, given the ur-quans natural territorial...ness, that the whole idea would be a bit rough =p

Many very solitary, individual animals have special social rituals for mating season (and only for mating season) that allow males and females to come together -- in some cases the territoriality switches off long enough to raise the children, in others just for the mating to take place (and the female bears and to some extent raises the children alone). The Melnorme, I think, explicitly compare the Ur-Quan to polar bears and praying mantises (which is eerie, come to think of it -- when did they ever have an opportunity to learn about Earth animals? Hmm...)

The interesting thing is that there could be some degree of learning and culture among such animals; the parents could stay with the children just long enough to teach them the basics of survival, but there'd be no large, extended family -- no clan or village as with humans -- for the culture to live in.

It seems like it'd take a while for the Ur-Quan to develop a culture at all, and probably wouldn't have a very complex one. Maybe that accounts for how easily, after the Slave Revolt, they encoded their culture so simply and brutally as a single command, and were able to keep it pure for so long. If tradition is always transmitted directly from parent to child in the child's formative years and social interaction is minimized afterwards, you don't have much opportunity for heresies and reform factions to develop.

Or inovation.

As to how the Traders learned about Earth animals. Well, the Melnorm
are primarily traders of information. Chances are they've come in contact
with at least one race that would know something of Earth animals.

The Arilou? =p

How much do they know about US?

They know your social security number and your favorite color and ESPECIALLY know how well you do in supermelee.

Odd, considering I dont HAVE a social security number.

You don't even know about it... that's how good they are.

I'm pretty sure Australia doesn't have them =p

Canada has a Social Insurance Number (SIN) which functions in
a very similar manner to the American SSN. However, it isn't
as used in as many places, thus making it harder to perform
identifty theft with a SIN.

The Ur-quan system is superior, in that EVERYONE knows your SSN. Mine is 999, in case you couldn't figure it out.

Incidentally, the payroll taxes are astronomical, largely because there is no $100k cutoff. Razing two or three civilizations a year on your own, with 10% going to the feds... owie.

Isn't there a loophole obtained by claiming your civ razing as a work, and you can loot the worlds on the side?